RE: HEX19 Nov 2024 09:17
A dark horse concept in the race to develop clean and sustainable energy sources is getting its first major investment from the U.S. government. Today, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the high-risk, high-reward arm of the Department of Energy (DOE), announced it would fund $20 million in grants to advance technologies for extracting clean-burning hydrogen from deep rocks. At the moment, all of the world’s hydrogen is manufactured industrially. But some researchers have concluded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Earth harbors vast deposits of the gas that could be tapped like oil—and that reserves could be stimulated by pumping water and catalysts into the crust.
The ARPA-E funding “will be the largest single investment in R&D of this nature worldwide,” says Yaoguo Li, a geophysicist at the Colorado School of Mines who plans to apply to the program. “It’s so new, a lot of other agencies and other countries are just waking up to this possibility.”
Hydrogen has drawbacks as an energy source: It is less energy rich than natural gas and occupies large amounts of space. But experts think it could replace fossil fuels in long-haul transport and heavy industries such as steelmaking—if it could be sourced in an environmentally friendly way. Most hydrogen today is manufactured by combining steam and methane in factories that emit carbon dioxide (CO2) and add to global warming. Governments are supporting efforts to make hydrogen cleanly, either by capturing the emitted CO2 and storing it underground (blue hydrogen) or by using renewable electricity to split water and harvesting the resulting hydrogen (green hydrogen). Later this year, DOE plans to select up to 10 blue and green hydrogen “hubs” as part of an $8 billion program.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
